Finished silver halide photographic films and papers are stored under a wide variety of conditions. Temperature and humidity serve to accelerate degradation of such photographic materials. The resistivity of the image dye to these conditions is crucial for retaining the color vividness of the original image dyes. In particular, yellow image dyes derived from pivaloylacetanilide containing an aryloxy coupling-off group (as shown in formula (II)), are very sensitive to the keeping conditions such as high temperature and high humidity. ##STR1## These needs are especially important in photographic elements designed as reversal elements designed for projection viewing.
Pivaloylacetanilide yellow couplers which are frequently used in the art suffer, in general, from low coupling activity due to the high pKa value of the couplers. To overcome the problem associated with the low coupling activity, aryloxy groups have been widely used as the coupling-off-group (COG) in order to enhance the coupling activity. Pivaloylacetanilide yellow couplers containing aryloxy COGs are disclosed in such patents as U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,408,194, 3,419,319, 3,429,391, 3,476,563, 3,644,498, 3,822,248, and 4,248,962.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,401,752 discloses that the coupling activity of the above-identified yellow couplers can be further enhanced by incorporating a polarizable group, such as alkanamido or alkanesulfonamido groups at the ortho position. However, such yellow couplers have been found to suffer from poor dye dark stability. Thus, a problem to be solved is to provide a pivaloylacetanilide yellow coupler containing an aryloxy COG but which exhibits improved dye dark stability.
A problem to be solved is to provide a silver halide photographic element which contains an active yellow dye forming coupler that does not exhibit poor dye dark stability.